The Oceans’ Junkyards

Flotsam and jetsam are two different things. Flotsam is an accident, debris that has fallen into the water haphazardly — a container full of sneakers swept off the deck of a ­freighter, for example. Jetsam, meanwhile is a thing of intent, cast into the sea deliberately, like a message in a bottle. This duality sums up the choppy but often surprising swirl Curtis Ebbesmeyer pulls together in “Flotsametrics and the Floating World: How One Man’s Obsession With Runaway Sneakers and Rubber Ducks Revolutionized Ocean Science,” written with the journalist Eric Scigliano.

Ebbesmeyer is a well-known oceanographer who has made a career out of tracking debris as it circulates around our planet’s 11 great oceanic gyres. But by his own admission, trying to give narrative coherence to his four-odd decades of processing beachcomber discoveries, analyzing bath toy spills and exploring oceanic “garbage patches” (one of which has a surface area twice the size of Texas) is akin to “drinking from a fire hose.” When approaching “Flotsametrics and the Floating World,” the reader must therefore parse the jetsam from the flotsam.

When it comes to the jetsam part — i.e., the part of the book with true intent — Ebbesmeyer’s goal is noble and fresh: to show how the flow of ocean debris around the world reveals the “music” of the world’s oceans. Ebbesmeyer does this through a series of studies of floating matter that are mostly pretty weird. Hockey gloves, plastic turtles, Nike sneakers — these are Ebbesmeyer’s lodestars, since they are often dumped en masse into the sea and distribute themselves around the world like so many data points on a vast liquid graph. Messages in bottles are also good, since it turns out they too are often put out to sea in great numbers. In the 1950s, the Guinness brewing company released some 200,000 messages in beer bottles. Even today, a few people write in each year to claim their reward.

Less successful are the flotsam-y parts of the book — the arbitrary releases about Ebbesmeyer’s career struggles or the detailings of one too many garbage finds. Still, just as one starts to drift off, so to speak, something bobs by that catches the eye. We learn that some human bodies naturally float while others sink, but that any body will sink for good if 12 extra pounds is added to its person; and that right-footed and left-footed sneakers track radically yet predictably different paths when they hit the same patch of sea. And eventually the flotsam-a-centric approach to human history that the authors propose becomes kind of fun.

Even the European discovery of Ameri­ca has a provenance in flotsam. Inspired by the drift patterns of debris in the Mediterranean, Columbus was able to plot a judicious course westward. Indeed, had he not used ocean currents to speed his journey, Ebbesmeyer argues, Columbus would most likely have had to turn back before sighting land.

Amid all these floaters, it is easy to miss the truly profound message that sneaks out at the very end of the book. After compiling and compressing a life of garbage, Ebbesmeyer found that the world’s great oceanic gyres turn out to be singing a kind of earth-size harmony. The gyres are in fact arranged in octaves, with each one spinning twice as fast as its lesser neighbor — “a global instrument with a prodigious range.” But as global warming changes the temperature gradients of the sea and unfreezes the current-blocking ice caps, all of this is about to be thrown into dissonance. Like any good scientist, Ebbesmeyer is loath to make a hard and fast prediction of what will happen as a result, but he is advanced enough in his career to venture a guess. “The gyres’ music,” he writes, “foretells a very different future from the gentle ride we have long enjoyed on their global carousel.”

FLOTSAMETRICS AND THE FLOATING WORLD

How One Man’s Obsession With Runaway Sneakers and Rubber Ducks Revolutionized Ocean Science

By Curtis Ebbesmeyer and Eric Scigliano

286 pp. Smithsonian Books/Collins/HarperCollins Publishers. $26.99

Paul Greenberg is the author of the novel “Leaving Katya” and of a forthcoming book about the future of fish.

A version of this review appears in print on , on page BR13 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Oceans’ Junkyards. Today's Paper|Subscribe